


Little Things

by ThisBeautifulDrowning



Category: due South
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-03
Updated: 2009-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:11:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisBeautifulDrowning/pseuds/ThisBeautifulDrowning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little things start avalanches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Things

**Little Things**

It starts like this: 'I want to lick his nipples,' Ray thinks, and then promptly goes to stick his head in a sink full of cold water. When he comes back, Kowalski's standing at the pin board between their desks, giving him a faintly puzzled look. Ray waves it off—'I'm fine, I'm good, I'm not going crazy, I _always_ run off to the bathroom in the middle of conversations about triple murders, carry on'—and settles back into his chair, wondering where the hell _that_ came from.

Okay, so he's looked. Of course he has. Hard not to, with Kowalski around him at least eight hours a day, wearing those damn tight shirts, stretched just tight enough that Ray gets treated to the sight of Kowalski's nipples perking up every time there's the least bit of chill in the air. Ray wonders what would happen if he were to shove Kowalski's shirt up and introduce those small, perky nipples to his lips and tongue and teeth. Some guys, it does nothing for them—doesn't do so much for some women Ray knows, for that matter—and Ray suddenly needs to know which category Kowalski falls into. Would he gasp and writhe? Or would he remain still, waiting for Ray to get over with it, get_ done_, to get some action a little further down going—

Perhaps he'd just shoot Ray in the head, which is what Ray's about to do, because sitting in the middle of the bullpen thinking about whether or not Kowalski has sensitive nipples is just—not good. They're at work, for one, and trying to solve a triple murder while thinking about your partner's nipples—damn it!—isn't helping, and two, well, there is no number two.

Aside from Kowalski being straight, of course, and a cop on top of that, and yeah, they've cracked down some on the slurs and the insults scrawled on lockers and the backup not coming when it's supposed to. Still, the force is one of the last bastilles of testosterone-filled manhood, and nine times out of ten getting a perp to confess still boils down to 'My cock is bigger than yours _and_ it shoots lead, I'm gonna make your miserable life a living hell, succumb to my macho, and oh, by the way, we've got this evidence and two eye-witnesses. But my cock is _still_ bigger than yours, nyah nyah'. Lots of hard guys. Lots of hard _girls_, sweet, competent ladies like Elaine here at the 2-7 and Deena down at the 39th being the rare exceptions Ray's aware of.

You want to play hardball, you've got to have hard balls, or imaginary ones, and 'gay' or 'bent' people, in a cop's world, too often still carry the stigmata/cliché of being soft-voiced, limp-limbed, effeminate guys who squeal like the porn queens out of the 70's movies. Or leather-wearing, whip-toting, mustached big-bears with colored hankies in their back pockets. Or short-haired, butch lesbians in men's clothing.

Ray's always kept his bisexuality a carefully guarded secret, backed up against rumors by being married to two women, both of whom he really loved and in one case, still somewhat does. What he does in bed is nobody's damn business but his own; who he does it _with_... well, a police precinct isn't exactly the best place for displays of love, no matter the gender. It gets people un-partnered faster than you can blink, and rightly so. You stop thinking rationally, after a while. Ray sure as hell had been ready, in the end, to shoot every goddamn bastard who so much as _breathed _in Benny's direction, and losing your cool like that, starting to get this kind of one-track mind—that's just not professional.

All in all, Ray's got about a million good reasons to _not think about Kowalski's nipples_, and then Kowalski leans over Ray's desk, right up in his face, and gives him this confused look that now has worry bleeding in around the edges, and all of those million good reasons fly right out the window. Because it's cold outside today, and they've just come back inside, and Kowalski's chest is framed nicely by the black straps of his shoulder holster, and his nipples are playing peek-a-boo.

"You okay?" Kowalski asks, voice soft enough for Ray to be silently thankful. Except for Elaine, and Welsh of course, there's nobody down here at the 2-7 who really _knows_ him, but word of mouth spreads fast and Armando Langoustini isn't that far in the past for his shadow to have faded completely. Ray doesn't need any of his fellow officers to look at him any more strangely than they already do, sometimes. "You're looking kind of pale."

"I'm fine," Ray drawls. He drags a folder into his lap and opens it. Kowalski leaning over the desk like that—Christ, it's giving him _ideas_, like reaching out to touch him, like bending him a little further over the desk and slowly peeling him out of his pants. Ray suddenly has a boner and nowhere fun for it to go, except rub uncomfortably against the fly of his pants. "You wanna lean over a little further and kiss me, maybe, or you wanna get back to work?"

Kowalski straightens up, clucks his tongue at Ray—not the least bit fazed by the kiss comment, Ray notes, but that could mean anything... and he's not supposed to _check_ for these things, damn it!—and points two fingers at him in that strange way he has. "You need to see a doctor. You've been looking a little funny for a while now."

'What I need are two hours with you cuffed to an immovable object and a soundproof room,' Ray thinks, and then groans, because not thinking about it? Yeah, not happening. "Let's just get back to the case, all right? We got some pretty solid leads and I think we need to talk to the landlady one more time."

A shrug from Kowalski; Benny'd be all 'Go see a doctor, Ray, untreated illnesses can lead to serious consequences even if it's just a common head cold, and by the way, in 1899, Trapper John Moosecake of the Fearless...'. Ray misses that, sometimes, the relentless way Benny goes on about some of the most incongruous things—which in the end mostly turn out not to be so incongruous at all.

But Kowalski? A shrug, another long glance at Ray, and he's turning back to the pin board, where they've collected their so far rather meager findings concerning the Anderson case.

*****

Ray spent about twenty years as a Chicago cop, and then two years as a Chicago cop with a Canadian RCMP officer as liaison, and then one year as a Chicago cop posing as a Las Vegas mafia bookman—_the_ Bookman—before the shit hit the fan in the form of Holloway Muldoon and a Russian submarine. Then he spent half a year in Florida with a beautiful woman, owning a bowling alley, until said beautiful woman, one morning, looked at him across the breakfast table and blinked, and asked, "Ray, what the hell are we _doing_ here?", and Ray said, "If I see one more bowling ball in my life, I'm gonna ram it up someone's ass."

So Ray had packed his bags and gone back to Chicago, to do what he's always been very good at: being a Chicago cop. He's lived in the city all his life, knows it inside out, and knows in his heart that he's already too old, too settled, to put down roots anywhere else. Chicago is Ray Vecchio's turf; his family lives here; this is the court where he shot hoops with his boyhood friends, this is the street corner where he made his first arrest, this is the city that will one day cradle his bones.

This is the city where he falls, and falls hard, for Stanley Raymond Kowalski, who is also his ex-wife's ex-husband and his ex-partner's ex-partner, and his current partner.

This is the city that will be witness to his ultimate descend into _madness_.

"Vecchio, you just ran another red light."

"Shut up, I'm driving."

Standard response, though Ray's sure Kowalski couldn't care less if he runs twenty red lights in a row or not, because Kowalski does it himself. Besides, they're kind of in a hurry here, what with O'Hare security alerting them that Adele Westerberg, by profession landlady of the Andersons, has just been arrested for trying to board a plane with a .38 handgun sewn into the lining of her handbag. Ray's fuming: the landlady was supposed to be watched closely, but somewhere along the chain of command, someone fucked up, and also, how _stupid_ can you be? If you want to go somewhere with a gun in your handbag, _sure_, use an airport, because they _don't_ have x-ray scans and people checking for just this kind of thing.

Portable lightshow flashing, they scream along Route 90 toward O'Hare, and Kowalski's drumming his fingers on his knee, humming under his breath. They've spent the morning and early afternoon following the few leads they had, some of which are definitely pointing toward Adele Westerberg _now_, some of which aren't, and Ray's had time to come down from his nipple-induced state of sexual arousal to the point where he can quietly admire the way Kowalski fills out his leather jacket. Which is: nicely, and if Kowalski moves just right, slouches a little in the car seat, Ray gets a glimpse of grey shirt stretched—

Damn it. That thing with developing a one-track mind? Yeah, that's happened, and it's taken all of four weeks.

"I still don't think she's the killer," Kowalski says, just as Ray pulls them off the highway and steers them toward a side entrance of O'Hare. "I mean, all the murders were done with a knife, right? So who's committing murder with a knife when they got a .38 lying around?"

"Sick bastards and psychopaths," Ray says, but he doesn't think Adele Westerberg is the killer, either. It doesn't fit; the woman definitely doesn't have a clean sheet, but he doesn't peg her for a cold-blooded murderer. "Mort still doctoring around with the grandmother?"

"Yeah. That woman was on every drug known to man, apparently. He said something about that making the diagnosis difficult, whatever. Personally, I just think he finally found opera tickets to that show he's been babbling about for weeks now. What was it, Camellia?"

"_Carmen_, and you really need to get over that dead body problem," Ray teases. Ahead of them, two airport security patrol cars are parked next to a personnel entrance, and Ray heads toward them. "Well, here we go."

Adele Westerberg, age 51, comes quietly. They need an hour to get the story behind the .38 out of her, and another hour to verify that it really belongs to her son Stephen, who's currently serving 9 years for a combination of aggravated assault and armed robbery, and two more hours to run the gun to verify that it hasn't been used in any crimes since 1994—at least not the registered ones. They charge Adele Westerberg with trying to smuggle a concealed gun onto a plane, grill her again about the night the entire Anderson family, with the exception of one teenage daughter, fell victim to a crazed, knife-wielding burglar, and then let her go.

Ray and Kowalski take a long-needed break, braving the station's evil coffee machine and commandeering one of the coveted tables near the window. Ray's so tired he keeps having to blink to keep his eyes open. Kowalski's yawning into his coffee cup while trying to drink, ending up with the world's cutest 'what the fuck?' expression when one of those yawns produces a small volcanic eruption of coffee-bubbles. Laughing, Ray hands him a napkin.

"Yeah, well," Kowalski says, mopping spilled coffee off of his chin, cheeks and the table top. "It happens."

"Sure it does." Ray's tired enough to find just about anything funny. He slouches back in the chair, watching Kowalski rub at the coffee stains that ended up on his shirt. "You need a straw, maybe?"

"Shut up," Kowalski says good-naturedly, grinning.

His eyes are laughing, Ray thinks. Maybe it's the fatigue, or the day's events, or something in the air, but when his gaze drops down to where brownish stains are marking Kowalski's coffee mishap, and Kowalski's nipples are—swear to God—more visible than ever, something in Ray's brain snaps. He's standing up and reaching for Kowalski's arm to drag him out of the chair before he knows what he's doing.

"Vecchio, what -"

Out of the break room, down the hall, around the left corner. "C'mon," Ray mutters, "c'mon, I gotta know." Twenty steps down the hallway, and there it is, the door to the supply closet. He doesn't even look around, just yanks it open and shoves Kowalski inside, then follows, swinging the door shut and yanking on the light bulb's flimsy cord at the same time.

"Vecchio," Kowalski asks slowly, "what the hell are you doing?"

"I gotta know," Ray says again, and his hands are moving before sense or self-preservation can intervene. Thumbs and index fingers of each hand find Kowalski's nipples through the soft t-shirt he's wearing, trapping and rolling them gently. He tugs just as gently, rubs the pads of his thumbs over the small bits of hard flesh, and expects to have his teeth punched out any second while he does it. And he'd deserve it, too—you just _don't_ grab your partner's chest after shoving him into the next best secluded place you can find.

But teeth-punching doesn't happen. Ray looks up; Kowalski's bearing an expression of extreme confusion, lips slightly parted, pupils wide in the supply closet's low light. His arms hang loose at his sides, and then the tiniest sound penetrates the lust-addled fog in Ray's brain. Kowalski's _whimpering_.

"I -" He pulls away. What the _hell_ is he doing? "I'm sorry—I need -"

"More?" Kowalski asks, sounding—Ray doesn't know what he sounds like. Kowalski licks his lips and says, "You need more."

"No." Because Christ, he's done _enough_ already, hasn't he? Ray steps away and is stopped by a pair of hands coming up fast and clenching into the lapels of his jacket. "Kowalski -"

"What if _I_ need more?" Kowalski asks, spreading his legs for a better stance and yanking Ray forward a step. "What if I _want_ more? Fuck, you -" He yanks again, and Ray ends up nose to nose with him, hands on the wall on either side of Kowalski's head to keep himself from falling into the other man, "- you give me these looks, and you do _this_ to me, and you don't think for one second what it does to me, and you—you do not _do_ this to people, Vecchio!" He takes a deep breath, confusion and anger and... something else, something indefinable, warring on his face. "You think I'm _blind_?"

'You gotta be,' Ray thinks stupidly, 'you never saw Benny look.' He's transfixed by the sight of Kowalski's lips, moving, shaping words and pushing them out. When the rest of his brain finally kicks in and he hears what Kowalski's _saying_, though, all of his higher thought processes grind to a screeching halt.

"...don't fuck around with me, do not _do_ that, I don't need to be made _fun_ of like this, you all coming on to me and then just walking away, it's not—it's not _fair_, you think this is easy for me, falling for another guy, but it's not, it is fucking _not_, and -"

Ray hears 'don't fuck around with me' and 'not fair' and 'falling for another guy', and touches his lips to Kowalski's. He ignores 'but it's not', trying to convey 'not_ making fun of _you' and 'I_'_ll_ fall right with _you' with what has to be the most chaste kiss in the history of kisses ever. Ray's seen an old black-and-white movie once, at a rundown theatre with his pop, before the old man started drinking all the money away, and the people in it were kissing the way Kowalski and he are kissing now: lips just barely touching, not even a hint of tongue or wetness involved, Kowalski all but stationary against him.

They stay like that for what feels like a small eternity, breathing each other's breath. Then the hands holding onto Ray's lapels are shoving him away, he's hitting his lower back against a jutting shelf-edge, and Kowalski's got both hands buried in his spiky hair, breathing hard and bending forward, staring at the dusty floor. "Jesus, Vecchio. Jesus."

"Jesus got nothing to do with this," Ray says quietly. He rubs his aching back, trying to gauge Kowalski's mood. The guy's explosive enough to end up rearranging Ray's face into a Picasso, after all; Ray's seen him lose his temper at the drop of a pin often enough by now. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry for molesting you, but... but you make it so damn _easy_."

Kowalski looks up, gives him an uncomprehending stare. Then he glances down, to where his chest still bears evidence to Ray's strategic attack, two tiny tents of cloth on his heaving chest. "What the hell?" The glare now directed at Vecchio has something ugly lurking at its bottom. "You tell rape victims to not wear short skirts, too?"

Ray raises his hands. "No. No, I don't. That's not what I meant." He sticks his chin out. "You want to destroy my face, you do it here and now. I deserve that much. Just," he winces at the plaintive note to his voice, "don't make a scene out there, okay?"

'Out there' being outside the supply closet's door, nothing more than a thin sheet of wood separating their little shelter from the ugly reality of witnesses to what could be Ray's ultimate mortification. Pounded into the floor by a punk like Kowalski, that's not how he wants to end this. Fuck, this wasn't supposed to _begin_ at all.

"I -" Kowalski's apparently at a loss for words. He knocks the back of his head against the wall, arms crossed tightly over his chest now. "I—kiss me again, Vecchio."

"What?" Ray blinks.

"Kiss me again. A _real_ kiss. I gotta—_I_ gotta know."

"Gotta know what? It doesn't matter what you said when I was fumbling at your, your," he gestures at Kowalski's chest, can't even bring himself to say it. This feels even more mortifying than what he'd imagine getting a beating from Kowalski would be like. God, this is painful; Ray feels almost physically sick. "I dragged you in here first."

"Vecchio," Kowalski says, sounding pained, "I'm having a crisis here. I've been straight all my life. _Straight_. And now I—I look at you, and I see you looking, and—fuck, _help me_." He drops his arms, looking so far out at sea that Ray can't help feeling his irritation, his cold-stomach-feeling, his _fear_, begin to bleed away. "I liked it, okay? I liked what you did, and I swear to God, I'm trying to figure this out, I'm not yanking your chain or anything, I just -"

Ray's always believed in ripping band-aids off quickly. If Kowalski needs a second kiss to decide if he wants to rearrange Ray's face, that's doable. Resolutely ignoring the tiny voice inside that keeps telling him that Kowalski didn't say 'NO!' outright, that there was a moment when Kowalski held the reigns—lapels!—and used them to pull them together, Ray crosses the short distance between them. He takes Kowalski's face into both hands, feels the emerging stubble of the late day on his cheeks and chin, and kisses him. Really kisses him, lips and tongue and all, tilting Kowalski's head to the best angle.

...and no matter how insecure or unsure or undecided Kowalski may be, he kisses right back. Makes a soft sound, even, into Ray's mouth, and then pulls away slowly, not pushing this time. Kowalski's eyes are half-lidded, none of his earlier hair-tearing and arm-crossing going on. "Okay," he says in a low murmur, when Ray drops his hands. "Okay."

He steps away, turns, and walks out of the supply closet, and leaves Ray, dust motes swimming in his vision and the phantom imprint of Kowalski's mouth still burning against his lips, to wonder what the hell 'okay' is supposed to mean.

*****

It means nothing, apparently, or maybe it means 'avoid Vecchio at all costs', because that's what happens for a full three days. They work on their triple murder case, actually nearly damn solving it until a _fourth_ member of the Anderson family turns up dead, but the easy familiarity between them is gone. Ray goes on his lunch breaks alone, instead of in the company of a certain, spiky-haired cop. He goes back to his new apartment alone—okay, so Kowalski's been here exactly once, when he helped Ray wrestle the new TV out of the elevator—and wonders when Welsh will call him into his office to tell him that Kowalski's requested a transfer to the other side of the planet.

On the fourth day, things take a turn from just ugly to absolutely horrible when the Anderson's teenage daughter's fingerprints turn up on a snapped-off knife blade Mort digs out of the grandmother's back, and they catch the girl—a sweet, dark-haired beauty with bruised eyes and knobby knees—trying to catch a ride on a Greyhound out of the city, going god knows where. The girl confesses to everything: to her father abusing her, to her mother ignoring her, to her grandmother telling her that these things don't happen in good families, to the older brother calling her a lying bitch trying to rip the family apart. To a night of whispers, and threats, and finally blood.

Ray goes home late, late in the night, to sit on his couch and stare sightlessly at his new TV, the screen as black and matte as the hole that girl had to cut her way out of, only to emerge right back into the hell of prosecutors and attorneys and the newspapers calling her the 'Bloody Lolita'.

Ray doesn't know how long Kowalski has been leaning on the doorbell until he finally hears the melodious 'ding-ding-ding'. He stands at his apartment door, listening to the elevator gears, wondering where the hell the world went wrong. Wonders if Benny took all the magic with him when he returned to Canada. Sure, they had their share of bad cases—Victoria, Irene—and they had their mad cases—Benny in _drag_, for fuck's sake—and they had their everyday Chicago crazy cases. Ray's been a cop long enough, and he's had his nightmare cases before Benny turned up in the precinct one day, too. Somehow, though, at the end of a case with Benny, with a very few exceptions, they always managed to work up a smile for each other, move their hands for a friendly pat on the shoulder, go home safe in the knowledge that they'd done a good deed.

Ray's never come home to feeling like he wants to revive a dead family just to kill them all over again.

Kowalski steps out of the elevator bearing a six-pack of beer and a large pizza box. He looks grey in the light of the corridor, the lines on his face more pronounced than ever, and he's sort of hunched into the safety of his leather jacket. "Hey."

"Hey." Ray steps aside and lets him in without another word. He can't even bring himself to feel thankful for the company Kowalski's offering; visions of Emma Anderson's tear-stained face are swimming up every time he blinks, and he just goes back to the couch after closing the door.

Kowalski disappears into Ray's kitchen and returns a few minutes later with two plates, a bundle of paper napkins, and two open bottles. Ray clicks on the TV, surfs channels until he finds a nature program running a documentary on the volatile nature of volcanoes. Just background noise, something to stare at, to listen to. He accepts the large slice of pizza on a plate Kowalski hands him, opens a napkin over his lap, and chugs down half the bottle without drawing breath.

They sit side by side, eating pizza, drinking beer, Kowalski's arm warm against his side, their thighs and knees touching. Ray manages two slices before his stomach rebels, and puts his plate down on the coffee table, wipes his fingers on the napkin. He drinks the last of his beer and turns on the couch so he's facing Kowalski. "Why are you here?"

Kowalski doesn't answer right away. He puts his plate next to Ray's and sits with his elbows on his knees, head hanging forward, and Ray only now notices that his spiky hair isn't so spiky at the moment, but kind of flattened except for a few random places toward the back of his head. His wrists look fragile poking out of the longsleeve he's wearing, and so does the back of his neck, the hair there baby-soft and fine. The line of his shoulders and the long, curved slope of his back look tense. "You have to ask?"

"After three days of watching you be the amazing invisible man? Yeah, I gotta ask." Ray waves at the pizza and the beer. "It's not that I'm not grateful for the booze and the food, but you could've talked to me at the station."

"With Emma Anderson in the next room and the press all but trampling all over us?" Kowalski huffs out a humorless bark of laughter. "I'm not stupid, Vecchio. When you walked out of the station, you looked ready to rip off heads."

"So what is this? Your idea of comfort?" Ray regrets the words as soon as they are out of his mouth; it's true, he _was_ ready to rip off a few heads and still is. "Hey, wait." Kowalski's already up off the couch, looking stung. Reaching for him with both hands, Ray tugs him back down on. "I'm sorry. It's just—this fucking case. The fucking reporters all over it like vultures."

"I thought you could use the company," Kowalski says quietly, staring at the coffee table. "I know _I_ need it."

Ray knows all about human tragedy and how it brings people closer together, makes them look for comfort in the most unlikely places. God, he's jaded. "That all?"

"No," Kowalski says, even more quietly, and leans over and puts his lips against Ray's.

They kiss on the couch, slow and careful. Ray's feeling too emotionally drained and _tired_ to try for mind-blowing, and Kowalski seems happy to just kiss him, is perhaps reluctant to do more. But it's good, it's fine. Ray doesn't even wonder if Kowalski's finally figured out his 'okay' and is letting him in on the secret, or if Kowalski's really just looking for a warm body to rub against, for company; he just goes with it, because right now a warm body is all _he_ needs. He'll think about the emotional ramifications later, when his brain is actually ready to think again. They finally end up horizontal, Kowalski on top, Ray's hands splayed on his back.

"I'm tired," Kowalski mumbles. "Can I crash on your couch?"

Ray's just a little bit hard—impossible not to, with Kowalski moving on top, all over him—but it's the kind of dreamy hardness that's not really going anywhere. Just a sweet, aching pull in his loins. "Yeah, sure." He slides a hand under the hem of Kowalski's t-shirt, strokes along the small of his back, closes his eyes. "Let me get you a pillow and blanket."

They kiss again, and at some point in time between the fifth kiss and finding out that Kowalski can somehow kiss away hurt and anger and frustration, Ray falls asleep.

He wakes up in the middle of the night to the scream of a siren somewhere outside and a crick in his neck, Kowalski crammed against his side, lying on his arm. Ray has no feeling whatsoever in that arm. It's also fucking cold, and when Ray slowly worms his dead arm out from under Kowalski, there's a grumble of complaint coming from the direction of the blond head tucked under his chin.

"Wake up," Ray says, a yawn cracking the words down the middle. He yanks his arm free, shakes it until the feeling returns, curses quietly when it's all pins and needles. "C'mon. Get up."

"No wanna."

"What are you, five?" Waiting for disorientation to fade—the apartment's still too new for Ray to navigate it in the dark without bumping into at least three walls and two tables—Ray pushes himself to his feet. "Nearly forty here. I'm not sleeping on the couch. And neither should you."

It takes almost five minutes to get Kowalski up off the couch and moving. Ray switches on the hallway lamp to avoid crashing into anything, then grins at the sight of Kowalski all small-eyed and pinched-mouth and so intent on shuffling after Ray step for step that he doesn't even seem to notice that Ray has taken him by the hand like a little kid. It's only when they reach the dark doorway to Ray's bedroom that Kowalski digs his heels in, apparently coming awake enough to realize where he is.

Ray doesn't say anything and leaves him standing at the doorway. He goes inside, switches on the light on his side of the bed, pulls down the comforter. There's his pajama, folded and ready, but he can't be arsed, just toes off his shoes and socks, drops his pants, twists his tie apart and shrugs his shirt off.

"Vecchio..."

One knee already on the bed, Ray looks over his shoulder, to where Kowalski's standing in the doorway looking as though he's lost something. "Yeah?"

Kowalski stares at him, expressive face shuttered. Then he takes a step forward, into the bedroom, and says, "Okay."

And it is.

*****

Ray wakes to weak sunlight crawling hesitantly through his bedroom, a strange half-light breaking thinly through heavyset rainclouds. He has no concept of the time whatsoever—could be early morning, could be the middle of the day; Welsh gave them the day off, and Kowalski is touching him: the world can burn right now and Ray wouldn't care. They didn't do anything when they went to bed together, just distributed the sheets more or less evenly for two pairs of feet to stay warm, and Ray distantly remembers the sensation of a pair of eyes burning twin holes into the back of his head just before he dropped off to sleep, but nothing else.

What he gets now is a hand creeping over his belly, fingers carding through the hair there. Yeah, Ray might be headed fast toward complete baldness, but he's got more than enough hair elsewhere to make up for it. It used to worry him: Benny's almost unnaturally smooth. Smooth chest, smooth belly, smooth legs. Oh, the guy _has _hair, but compared to Benny—hell, compared to _Stella_ \- Ray is Cousin Itt. Some people are turned off by all that body hair, but Kowalski doesn't seem to be among them. Or maybe he's figuring out if he is. He's running his hand from the waistband of Ray's boxer shorts all the way up to his collar bones, and Ray finds himself being thankful for that, for the fact that Kowalski isn't afraid to touch.

Kind of a no-brainer after the kissing and getting into the same bed with him, but in the light of day things always look different than when you're sleep-deprived and hurting.

Lips on his face, teeth gently nipping at the edge of his jaw, and Ray opens his eyes. Kowalski's leaning over him, up on one elbow, his free hand gravitating toward all the spots that make Ray feel little electric shocks down in his toes. And there's morning breath, and beer-and-pizza breath, and the sweat of a day's worth of running around, but Ray can't bring himself to care. He shifts, threading his arm around Kowalski's middle and pulling him closer, and gets a glimpse of a grin on Kowalski's face before they're kissing—_really_ kissing, not the careful explorations of before. Ray drags his fingernails up Kowalski's spine to feel him shudder, mumbling something into Ray's mouth that might be a curse, might be encouragement. He does it again, bringing his other hand up to cup Kowalski's face, and rolls until he's on top, the sheets and pillows going every which way.

"I want to see you come," Ray murmurs into Kowalski's mouth, and Christ, just the feeling of all that _skin_ pressed against his makes him feel lightheaded and all his blood rush south. A few last, clinging shreds of doubt vanish when Kowalski shoves his hips up against him, definite evidence that he doesn't mind this at all trying to tunnel a way through Ray's belly. He manages to get his arm out from under him, shoves his hand between them, down to where their erections are separated by nothing more than twin layers of flimsy cloth. Kowalski groans and arches into him when Ray gets his hand around him, fumbling the waistband of his underwear down far enough to get to skin. "Let me. Let me, _please_."

Slowly, Kowalski unwinds his arms and legs from around Ray. He stretches, arms raised above his head, going from playing octopus to sudden, complete... _pliancy_ in a matter of seconds. Ray's mouth goes dry. Christ on a crutch. "Do you -"

"I said I was looking, didn't I?" Kowalski rubs the back of his head against the pillow. "Just - I wouldn't be here if I didn't want it."

Ray strokes up Kowalski's cock, rubs his thumb just there under the head, fascinated by the way Kowalski's mouth falls open. "This isn't—this isn't just about getting off. You know?"

"Fuck, Vecchio, I know. Okay? I'm not completely stupid."

"Really? Could've fooled me."

"Shut -"

'Up' gets turned into something long and breathy with lots of 'a's in it when Ray strokes him again. Yeah, there _is_ stuff they have to talk about, but not now. Now is Ray getting to his knees, sitting on his haunches between Kowalski's legs, stroking him steadily and firmly and watching pre-come well up at the tip of his cock. They're still both in their boxers, but Ray couldn't stop for anything now. He wants to, needs to see Kowalski come undone, weeks of jacking off to imagining him doing this very same thing not living up to the reality of that pale-skinned, sharp-cut body writhing before, against him. Every guy likes a hand job, but Kowalski's muttering 'Vecchio' often enough to let Ray know that he _knows_ who's in bed with him, that there isn't Stella, or anyone else, behind his closed eyes.

Ray could lose himself here, if he hasn't already. He cups Kowalski's balls to feel them tighten, dares—do not scare off the up until very recently straight man—to rub his fingertips down the narrow stretch of skin between Kowalski's balls and ass, grinning when that gets him a loud moan and a curse. Despite Ray's plea to be the one doing the touching, Kowalski can't seem to keep his hands away from Ray: he's running them over every bit of skin he can reach, which isn't very much with him on his back, but for Ray, it's enough. When Kowalski comes, his back arching so sharply that Ray thinks for a second that his spine will snap, Ray hungrily watches, taking in every minute change in expression.

Then he drops forward, hand still wrapped tightly around Kowalski's cock, and rubs himself off against the smooth hollow of a hip, gasping and shuddering his way through climax with his mouth pressed against Kowalski's sweaty sternum.

"Good," Kowalski mumbles, hissing when Ray strokes up his cock one last time to wring the last drops from him. "Don't. That. Too much."

"Mmh," Ray agrees. He runs his hand up Kowalski's side instead, under his shoulder, fingers folding over top of it. "I'll try to 'member that..."

A few minutes pass, or maybe it's an hour, before his eyes open again. Ray can't tell if the light in the bedroom's changed, but he knows that he's still lying on top of Kowalski, who's passing his hands over the back of Ray's head and upper back, a gentle, calm motion. Come is sticking them together in a few not so great places, and they definitely need a shower sometime soon. Feeling warm and content, and not at all inclined to move, Ray finds himself contemplating the many ways he could coax Kowalski into taking a shower together, when his aimlessly wandering gaze falls on something that's literally just two inches in front of his nose: Kowalski's small, perky nipple.

"Annoying little bugger," Ray mutters.

The hands on him stop moving. There's a slight edge to Kowalski's voice as he asks, "What? Who?"

So easily unsettled. So easily hurt. Ray feels the immediate need to make it better. "This," he says, and moves to give the annoying body part in question a gentle suckling. "They started it."

Kowalski gasps and wiggles, then settles down. "...my nipples started—my _nipples_?"

"What, like the thing in the supply closet didn't make that clear?" Ray brings his hand up, rolls a thumb over the now wet and extra-perky nipple. "Just be happy that closet exists—any more of watching you wander around in those damn shirts of yours and I would've molested you right in front of God, everyone, and Welsh."

"You are either the weirdest—no. Vecchio. You are unhinged."

"Maybe. You mind?"

Kowalski starts stroking him again, finally letting his hands settle at the back of Ray's neck, fingers laced together. "No."

Ray relaxes. "Good."

And it is.

END


End file.
